Posts tagged ‘yoshi’s’

Yoshi’s in Oakland, at Jack London Square, is still in place. But the San Francisco location, part of a fantasy revival of jazz in the Fillmore district, changed owners July 1, and its replacement switched to a new name, The Addition, sometime this month.

Yoshi’s SF was never able to repay a $7.2 million loan from San Francisco’s redevelopment agency; a bankruptcy agreement has the city forgiving $5 million of that loan.

The articles linked above list reasons why Yoshi’s was an awkward fit for its neighborhood. The SF club was a carbon copy of the Oakland club, for instance; I thought that was a nice touch, but the high-end Japanese cuisine and quilted, highbrow interior didn’t catch on with the Fillmore neighborhood. I have to believe the opening of the SF Jazz Center didn’t help, either, as that’s now the premiere stop for any name acts coming through.

Turns out the locals weren’t so interested in jazz anyway, which is why both Yoshi’s locations, but especially the San Francisco spot, began booking outright pop acts.

Pop now dominates Yoshi’s Oakland, although the club is still trying. The Bad Plus is doing a three-night run, and Marcus Shelby still gets booked. Ernie Watts and Joey DeFrancesco are on the upcoming calendar as well — not really my stuff, but it’s still a chance to raise the jazz flag.

Look, I understand business is business. Jazz — or really any entertainment that’s more for the cerebellum than for the lizard brain that loves loud noises and flashy lights — isn’t a moneymaker any more. I can’t say I could run Yoshi’s any better. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be unhappy when a sympathetic venue closesdown, or even when its attention to the good stuff starts diminishing. The Addition has booked a lot of jazz for November, but it’s mainstream stuff — and besides, The Addition is not going to identify itself as a jazz club.

Duende has shrunk its music calendar as well, although it hasn’t watered down the mix to the extent Yoshi’s has. Ownership says the revenues couldn’t justify running the attic space for music every night, which is believable. I also have to assume that patrons had limited taste for hearing the occasional electronics buzz or Nels Cline-style freakout over their meals.

But one of Duende’s founders had an honest interest in the music, going back to the heyday of The Knitting Factory (another club that eventually gave up the jazz thing). I’ll take what they can offer as long as they can offer it.

The thing to do, of course, is to look beyond the clubs. There are so many other venues that offer a welcome that feels less temporary. The Luggage Store Gallery, the SIMM series, Berkeley Arts, and others I’m forgetting — they’ve been offering creative music on a regular basis for years. The Center for New Music is a younger operation built strictly for new-music interests. The Oakland Freedom Jazz Society no longer has a regular slot at Duende’s but has been finding other places to host shows — here’s a pair of solo clarinet sets they’re presenting at Studio Grand (another venue to mention) on Dec. 3.

I’m leaving out many others, I’m sure. Just understand that there are a lot of options for creative music in the Bay Area. Check out BayImproviser.com if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Yoshi’s has faded from the creative jazz radar, but Bay Area music fans still have a lot to be thankful for. The hole was filled some time ago.

My wife gives me a hard time about this: In 1999, we traveled to Europe, and I got to see Tim Berne twice on the trip.

What’s important is that I didn’t create our itinerary. By pure coincidence, our three-week trip crossed Berne’s path two times. It helped that this was my wife’s first time in Europe, so we were sticking to the big cities — but that’s never been enough explanation for her. She still calls shenanigans on it.

She’s not a fan of avant-jazz but she knew Berne’s name well by then. She knew I couldn’t pass this up. She came with me to see the Bloodcount quartet in Munich, and a week or so later, I ventured out alone to see Berne play duo with guitarist Marc Ducret outside Paris, at Les Instants Chavirés.

This was part of an unusual streak. My first six Tim Berne shows were in six different cities, only one of them in the Bay Area. Even more random than the European trip was the time I had to travel to Denver — the only time I’ve ever been to the city, as opposed to the airport — and Tim Berne was doing a one-off gig in Colorado Springs, on a night when I could make the drive in my company-subsidized rental car. That’s the kind of luck I’ve had. Drives my wife nuts.

“Luck” is the right word, because while my first Berne concert did happen to be in San Francisco, we don’t often get chances to see downtown NYC musicians. For obvious reasons. It’s one thing for them to hit Philly, New York, and Boston even for sparsely attended gigs. Flying to San Diego in hopes of playing to 20 people, then driving yourself eight hours to Oakland for the next night’s show — that’s a whole other proposition.

Still, it’s not impossible. Berne had already arranged some dates before signing his record deal with ECM for Snakeoil (reviewed here). So, he’d done the legwork, but having ECM’s backing certainly helped in terms of audience size, he says.

So it was that I got to see Berne and Snakeoil play Yoshi’s in Oakland last month. I keyed on in Oscar Noriega‘s clarinet more that I did on my first CD listens.This might have been at the sacrifice of Matt Mitchell‘s piano, which I tended to notice less. Ches Smith, who played in so many Bay Area ensembles before leaving for New York, got huge whoops and applause when he was introduced on stage, and he didn’t disappoint. I don’t think he brought the tympani that he uses on the CD, but he did have a wide array of tricks and traps, including a vibraphone.

I had a great time, of course. It feels like I just saw Berne at Yoshi’s, performing with Michael Formanek. That’s two shows in a span of less than a year, with a longshot possibility of catching the trio of Berne, Jim Black, and Nels Cline in May. Apparently, I’m on another hot streak. Don’t tell my wife.

Yoshi’s doesn’t allow videotaping, so I’m not aware of video of this show. Below are videos of a couple of other recent Snakeoil appearances. The first is of better sound and video quality, despite some moments of shaky camera work. [It’s now been taken down, possibly the result of one too many unauthorized tapings.] The second (“Scanners”) is shorter and more “home-video,” but you get to hear Berne make a crack about cracks about Oregon.

In the fine “echo chamber” tradition of blogging, I point out that someone else wrote up the last night’s Trio M show in La Jolla, near San Diego.

Robert Bush does a good job reviewing the show for the San Diego Reader, where the headline says the trio “astonished” the audience. Two things that stood out to me:

1. A great description: “On this night, everyone became the drummer, at some point.” Meaning each band member: Mark Dresser (bass), Myra Melford (piano), and of course Matt Wilson (actual drums). It’s an observation you can make about a lot of outside-jazz shows, but it seems particularly pertinent here, where Melford digs into prepared-piano sounds and Dresser explores the percussive side of his instrument. I liked it.

2. Dresser apparently played that Trio M show on Feb. 2 and a Los Angeles date on Feb. 3, flew to Anchorage for a show Feb. 4, and is returning to California for Trio M’s Feb. 6 gig at Yoshi’s San Francisco. That’s hardcore.

Trio M will indeed play in San Francisco on Monday, Feb. 6, ending a quickie California tour to support the new release, The Guest House (Enja, 2012). It should be a great show, but if I can get out on Monday, I might opt instead for the monthly jazz show at The Makeout Room in SF. It’s been too long since I’ve attended one of those, and I know I can’t make it to the March edition.

Monday night’s crowd at Yoshi’s Oakland was lively and responsive and actually a bit over-the-top, but when some big-name guys make the trek here from New York — hey, why not? I was happy to see them, too, and glad they drew a bustling, receptive crowd.

And it was good to hear Michael Formanek‘s band outside the spacious ECM shell of their record, The Rub and Spare Change. (Reviewed here.) I actually love that ECM sound, which I don’t find as antiseptic as some critics say, and which does leave room for a brilliantly burning energy. But live music, for many performers, benefits from being more visceral. That’s what we got: a more visceral, gut-reaction version of the quartet, with songs nourished by repeated live performances.

A review of the band’s recent L.A. gig noted that “Tonal Suite” was the opener — the five-segment, 17-minute “Tonal Suite.” I wasn’t sure how the audience would take to that, but they went ape over it. People didn’t applaud after solos — it’s hard with creative music, since a “solo” overlaps so heavily with the rest of the piece — but they seemed to be well into the groove with Tim Berne‘s spirited sax solo, and they appreciated Craig Taborn‘s bright piano splashes. It helped that “Tonal Suite” ends with an active, upbeat theme that gets repeated here and there, complete with a nifty false ending, like an inside joke.

Formanek’s writing, like Berne’s, uses complex melodies often jutting with odd-time-signature shards. The set mostly consisted of new pieces, mostly on the peppy side — that might be one reason the crowd stayed so engaged, although folks around me were also dead silent (a rarity at Yoshi’s) during Formanek’s one unaccompanied bass solo. One piece I remember in particular, “Rising Tensions,” was light on its feet and included a lovely yet electric Taborn solo. “Pong,” the set ender, came in a lovely chiming 6/8, likeable and relatively easy listening. (At the table next to me, after the show, a couple of people mentioned it being their favorite.)

Throughout, Gerald Cleaver was a monster on drums — lots of strength and sound — and Taborn’s piano was not only lightning-quick but fiendishly inventive. The band was loose and smiling

The encore was “Twenty-Three Neo,” the opening track to The Rub and Spare Change, which is based on a delicate and hypnotic piano line. They played it even more slowly, more delicately, than on the CD — a different kind of “visceral” breakthrough. Cleaver was a model of restraint, using silence as the glue to hold the piece, rather than breaking the careful mood.

Formanek has some roots in the Bay Area and mentioned the December passing of “Bishop” Norman Williams, crediting him as a major influence that steered him towards the edgier side of jazz. Good work, Bishop. Hopefully, you’d agree that you did good work here.

Suffice to say, they’re a really good free-jazz quartet with some great ideas (sometimes radical, sometimes extensions of the jazz tradition) and a deliciously evil alter-ego as the band Go-Go Fightmaster. They also just might be the most frequently mentioned band on this blog, which is a function not of my stalking them, but of their appearances in high-profile circles, such as Monterey and the Village Voice. Here, look:

Wed., March 30, Oakland — Trio M stops by on their way to the Brubeck Festival in Stockton. It’s the combination of Myra Melford (piano), Mark Dresser (bass), and Matt Wilson (drums), who showed their collective stuff on a 2007 album, Big Picture (Cryptogramophone). It’s modern jazz with an agile personality, where the solos take wide turns at the curves and keep only a loose grip on the road. They’re all busy and don’t get together often. Just sayin’.

You might consider Sarah Wilson’s stuff to be pop jazz at first, but it’s interesting that she’s got the support of Myra Melford (piano) and Ben Goldberg (clarinet). On this album, they’re given ample room to wander about, turning the songs into layered tapestries rich in detail.

As Andrew Gilbert wrote for the East Bay Express, Wilson didn’t set out to be a jazz composer. Her first writing job, a 1995 commission, was completed on intuition built from Dixieland jazz and evenings spent at the Knitting Factory, back when it was a haven for outside jazz.

Trapeze Project is a bright, upbeat album, with a traditional jazz sense of melody and a lot of busy chatter from piano, clarinet, bass (Jerome Harris) and drums (Scott Amendola … this is one heck of a band she’s assembled). A lot of tracks work the way “Blessing” does, starting out with a pleasantly brassy theme — something you’d associate with a small circus, maybe — then getting into loose, swirling solos and comping. (Actually, traditional New Orleans jazz can get this way. I remember being struck by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, because they’d get into group-improvising stretches where they’d stick to the tune, yet nobody was playing any part of the tune any more, except arguably the drummer.)

I especially liked “Zebulon,” a jumping, bluesy romp with a terrific solo from Goldberg.

A lot gets made of the fact that Wilson sings — particularly on a folky take on Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” I like her voice; she’s closer to indie-rock deadpan than jazz crooning. She’s got three vocal tracks on here, plus some wordless singing on “She Stands in a Room,” a slower track where her “da da dum” vocals meet a chord that conjures a widely opening sky, a very nice touch.

Drummer Scott Amendola is about to put out his first album leading a trio, Lift. It’s coming Oct. 19.

You can hear tracks by going to Amendola’s “Audio/Video” page. Click on “radio,” and the fixed program will start with the snappy funk of “Lima Bean” followed by the airy drum solo that opens “Lift,” the title track that sketches a peaceful twilight setting. (Then stick around for the high-strung funk of “59th Street Blues,” from Amendola’s first album.)

You can’t judge Lift by two tracks, but here goes. The surface is showing a reimagining of T.J.Kirk-type funk and a rediscovery of jazz territory. But the start to “Lift” shows there’s going to be room for some wide-open improvisation as well.

Amendola also has a love of African pop and a growing sensibility for electronics both as featured instruments and as backdrop. Those factors gave the Scott Amendola Band a broad scope. The most recent album, Believe (Cryptogramophone, 2005) does have some funk and rock elements — one track could be a Crazy Horse instrumental — but it’s also got deep, ambitious pieces like the reverent “Cesar Chavez.”

That band also benefitted from a lineup of expansive players — Jeff Parker and Nels Cline on guitars, and Jenny Scheinman on violin. Lift pares things down to a trio, with Parker and S.A.Band bassist John Shifflett. But at the same time, Amendola has broadened his scope in compositions and in performance options — his electronics play some key roles in recent Nels Cline Singers albums, The Celestial Septet and the colossal Initiate.

Amendola is taking the trio on a small CD release tour around the Bay Area and up the coast. (Note that the itinerary includes Dana Street Roasting Co. in Mountain View — a neat local coffee house that’s willing to go out on a limb for the sake of good music. Support them!)